I recently worked with a team of content writers, where we had introduced Kanban to help with the flow and consistency of delivery. The cycle time of work had reduced, but it was still high and as a team they seemed a little flat. They knew ‘what’ they were doing as individuals, but not the context of ‘why’ they were doing it.

It can be easy to forget what a Product Owner or Scrum Master actually do. A poster with a role description can come in handy so, based on popular demand, here are the beautifully designed ones we use at Trade Me.

Out there in the wild uncharted world of software development, those who would deny Agile is a good thing are still living in caves and grubbing around beneath waterfalls. But negotiation theory suggests that if you can shape a vision by asking incisive questions you can help even vehement challengers reach agile decisions. So what is an incisive question?

Doing too many things at once can slow an entire organisation down. Every successful organisation will have more great ideas than they have capacity to build, and it is tempting to start too many of them at the same time.

Agile maturity and benchmarking models. I have a problem where they are used for comparison of where a team should be in their agile practices adoption; a one size fits all approach where teams must conform or they aren’t doing ‘agile right’. This approach is a fixed repeatable answer that conveniently ignores the question.

At Trade Me we want to measure the overall health of Tech (that’s our team of 125 designers, developers, testers, BAs, and Squad Masters) to identify trends and to know if we are getting better (or worse!). We know that when we measure something it is a strong way of saying “This matters” which is why we put a lot of effort into deciding which metrics to collect.

Spotify’s Scaling Agile at a Glance

Spotify’s whitepaper on how to structure an organisation with Agile tribes, squads, chapters and guilds has been the most inspiring and interesting idea to come out of the Agile scene in the past three years.

I fundamentally believe that organisations get the best results when people can choose what they work on and who they work with. In that spirit Trade Me decided to let people self-organise into small, cross-functional teams called squads.

Projects come to an end, which means that a team that has been working closely together, may well be torn apart. This can lead to a sense of loss associated with disbanding some strong team relationships; especially if the team has reached the fourth ‘Performing’ stage of Tuckman’s model of group development.

Let’s face it, the daily standup can be a boring affair. I’m not talking about abominations with 16 people or half-hour long status reporting meetings. I’m talking about the ones that are kind of okay and adhere to the rules but nonetheless are a bit boring and lack focus and enthusiasm.

Last Friday we had Fedex day at Trade Me. The aim of a FedEx Day is to complete something deliverable within a 24 hour period, i.e. to go from idea to a shippable product within a day. It was fun, lots of great projects saw the light of day and I enjoyed doing some hands-on work for a change.

Hi, my name is Simon and I am a Project Manager at Trade Me. Sandy kindly asked me to contribute to her blog, and I consider it a great honour. Below is my story about how we embraced Agile to inject magic into our project.

Last week Jan, Mike, Anthony and I were at Agile Australia in Sydney and had an incredibly good time. The conference turned Twitter handles into people, exposed me to TimTam slams, and taught me that Beyond Budgeting is not a boring accounting thing but a riveting management philosophy.